


The Prince of the Air and the Saint of the Sun

by DreamsAtDusk



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 21:32:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7239280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamsAtDusk/pseuds/DreamsAtDusk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nikolina-focused prompt responses under 1000 words in length.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prince of the Air and the Saint of the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-Ruin and Rising, AU with divergence at the end of the book's plot.

It had taken her a time to find him.  When she finally did, Alina was amazed at herself for it - he was sitting on a fallen log, staring off into the distance, with nary a guard or banner to call attention to the fact that _Korol Rezni_ was here.  She promptly put the question from her mind of how _she_ had located him here on the edge of nowhere; there were possibilities she could not bring herself to think on now.  Call it luck.

She had had little enough of that in her life.

Alina assumed a seat on the log next to him and for long moments, neither she nor Nikolai spoke.  Eventually, she turned to him.

“How are your hands?”

They rested on Nikolai’s thighs, held with a brittleness that suggested they were dubious foreign matter, rather than part of his own limbs.  He shifted them, turning them palm up for a moment, then drew off one glove.  Except for a gash that was deeper than others, the cuts had almost entirely healed.  But the black lines that shadowed his veins were no different than when she had first laid eyes upon them.

“Functional.  But, I think…I’ll have to figure out what sort of rings would go best with this look.”  He attempted to sound flippant, but it was a failure.  A miserable one and Nikolai winced as though he heard it himself.  Alina knew, deep down, he intended never to appear in public without gloves ever again.

She lifted her own hand and laid it palm to palm against the one he still held up before him, tucking her fingers down alongside his.  

Once she would have been quite tickled at causing Prince Perfect to look as shocked as he did then.  But now, it only hurt.  His face was bewildered and she felt his hand jerk faintly in hers.

“What about you, Alina? How…how are you?” Nikolai’s voice was very gentle and for a brief flash, it felt like her hand in his was a betrayal.

She drew in a breath and they let their hands settle to the log between them, as she turned to gaze out at the horizon as he had been.  “I feel very quiet inside.  I don’t think it will last. And I don’t—” Her head wavered from side to side.  “I don’t know what to, to do now.”  All of her life, she had wanted somewhere to belong.  But there was nothing left to go back to.

“We’ve a bit longer here before we’re through vetting the Grisha that surrendered.  But, wherever you wish to go, Alina, you have only to say.    An estate, a dacha in the Lake District, as many servants as you need, a title - just tell me.”  He did not say that she would have all that she could ask for; even the King of Ravka could not grant her that and Nikolai knew it.

Her head went light with it, in the worst of ways, a thrust of nausea wriggling up her throat.  She swallowed it down and carefully took her hand back.  “I’ll, uh, have to think on it.  I don’t really need much.  And—”  Scrabbling in a pocket, Alina extended an emerald ring to him.

After a moment, Nikolai started to reach for the ring, his mouth a thin, set line.  But at the last second, he only sighed and folded her fingers around it.  “Keep it.  Alina…I know you don’t love me.  Even if you did, I couldn’t ask that…”  His breath shuddered out and his eyes closed for a moment.  “It’s not simply my hands.  I still feel it.  Like it’s something caught up under my ribs that I can’t get out.  I can’t remember everything that I did while…but I remember too much.  My hands…I have done such things that…   How could I ever expect someone to want me to touch them after that?”

Her heart was already a fractured thing in her chest; the cracks stretched and widened.  Alina brought her other hand up to touch the one of his holding her fingers closed.  

“You’re wrong.”  She gave him no time to respond to that, plunging onward.  “I do love you.  Not the way that I…”  It was her turn to draw a deep breath and choke on a word - a name - that was more than a mere word, but memories that cut very deep, for all that they were not the painful ones that he bore.  The pain came in knowing that there would never be anything but memories now.  “Not like him.  But you’re my friend and I’m sorry this happened to you. Nikolai, it’s not your fault.”  She tried to smile at him, even as tears leaked at the corners of her eyes.

“It’s not yours either, Alina.  I’m so sorry. About—”

“Shh.”  Because she could not bear to hear it, not yet.  Reaching out, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and, with a tense moment interleaved, Nikolai slumped against her and returned the embrace.

Quietly, near her ear: “Do you truly want to return to Os Alta?”  Unspoken: with me?

“I do.  But you have to promise me something.”

Nikolai sat back and nodded. “What?”

“That you’ll do something about the hideous decor in the Grand Palace.  If the King can’t save us, I don’t know who can.”

It was too much, that either of them laugh just now.  But he smiled a little, and in the tentative curve of his lips, Alina spied the prince, bold and bright, she had known.  A broken Saint and a broken King - perhaps together, they could grow to pull the pieces of themselves back together. 


End file.
